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Mayas • Aztecs • Incas: All-in-One Resource With Background Information, Map Activities, Simulations and Games, and a Read-Aloud Play to Support Comprehension and Critical Thinking in Social Studies
Ancient America comes to life as students explore the Yucatan, meet Montezuma, visit Machu Picchu, and more. Students will find themselves immersed in these ancient cultures writing Mayan glyphs, creating ancient ballgame trading cards, designing clothing catalogues, and learning about the Aztec religion. Active learning strategies make history accessible to all learners.
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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August 18, 2018
SLIGHTLY WEAK ON CALENDAR ADN MATHEMATICS ISSUES
This is a resource book for High school students and it contains a great number of interesting activities, both for individual students and for groups within a class. It could also be useful for end-of-year projects.
This book puts together three main civilizations and peoples from Mesoamerica and South America. One clue about their older history, their origins is given incidentally in the book when speaking of the Incas. The author says it is believed by archaeologists that the Indian population has been present in Chile for at least 33,000 years. This is true and has to do with the archaeological site of Monte Verde in Chile, though the site has only reached the 25,000-year-old level. There is a third level that is estimated due to core samples to go back to 33,000 years ago.
Those three peoples would then be the resulting civilizations of the migrations of these old human occupants in Chile towards the North, in the Southern and Mesoamerican continents where they eventually met with other Indians arriving from the North. The question is where did these southern peoples come from. The only logical answer is that they came to Chile as the final point of the South Pacific Polynesian migration; There is no reason why the stone-civilization of Easter island should have stopped there after their long voyage (mostly by sea) from South East Asia.
The book insists, though discreetly, on the blood culture of the Mayas and the Aztecs and today we know it was also the case with the Incas. Human and animal sacrifices were equally practiced in the three cultures for the same reason, to pacify their gods. The students will have the opportunity to go beyond and should be suggested to widen the question and check the practices of human sacrifice, often called death penalty, in most if not all human civilizations, particularly the European and Middle Eastern ones. In the same way, as Jesus has been transformed into a religious icon after his crucifixion, the sacrificed human beings of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were bringing to themselves eternity, to their families pride and to their communities the future support of their gods.
This aspect is not explored enough. Systematically in Europe and the Middle East of ancient times killing, in a way or another, human beings was considered a punishment of these human beings, at times for purely fantasized crimes like sorcery or witchcraft. But most of the time the crime was no crime at all but just a particular behavior refused by society, like homosexuality, or “offensive” writings and preachings, or “nationalist” demands like in the case of William Wallace, or even for simple religious differences like Protestantism, Catholicism or Judaism, not to mention Islam.
The writing system is not explained as clearly as it should. The glyphs at stake are not hieroglyphs, not comparable at all to Egyptian hieroglyphs, even in the oldest form of this Mayan writing system. This writing system is a phonetic syllabary in its classical form with some of the glyphs retained as such with their full value and meaning. But the writing system in squares represents a third articulation language whereas the Egyptian hieroglyphs are the writing system of a Semitic language. The alphabet will only be invented by the other Semitic people, the Phoenicians. In a similar way, the Mayan glyphs have nothing to do with the Chinese characters typical of a second articulation language. The question we may ask is whether the Maya language is agglutinative or synthetic-analytical, but definitely a third articulation language like all agglutinative Turkic languages and all Indo-European or Indo-Aryan synthetic-analytical languages. The next question is where did those language come from, what languages are their ancestors? That has to do with the question of from where did these peoples come from and when did they arrive?
At the same time even if these glyphs are mostly syllable glyphs within a phonetic syllabary, they retain in the background the meaning of the original glyphs and that is the most difficult part of this language: the meaning is dictated by the phonetic syllabary used to write words and sentences, but with glyphic meanings behind many of these syllabary elements. Any good Maya Dictionary provides such elements.
We can say there are three calendars, but mathematicians would say there are only two because the Long Count is only the extension of the Haab. At the same time, the Tzolkin is thirteen cycles of twenty days that have proper names, but the numbering of the days in this calendar, besides their naming, is twenty cycles of numbers from1 to 13. This means that days are identified in the calendar by their names followed or preceded by a number from 1 to 13. Each day will appear thirteen times in the calendar each time with a number between 1 and 13 but each number only once, and the same thing for the twenty days. The full calendar contains then in the case of the day “Ben” thirteen instances of it with numbers from 1 to 13, cyclically appearing in the 260-day calendar, in fact with a distance of twenty days between each appearance.
In the same way, it is a mathematical mistake to say that the symbol looking like a shell is equivalent to our “zero.” The base 20 numbering system has nineteen numbers and the shell is the last one marking the completion of one basic 20 units and it triggers the shifting to the next group of twenty. The presentation page 32 is thus erroneous. The first group contains twenty units from 1 to the shell-like symbol for 20. The next group of twenty starts as one upper-tiered dot plus one lower-tier dot for the first number of this group 21. But it is true the Mayas are unique in the world for their use of a vigesimal counting system which is equivalent to our decimal counting system built on a base 10 principle. But the first group of ten is not 0 to 9, those are the digits, but it is 1 to 10 and the next group is 11 to 20. This is logical because 0 is a digit but it is not a number since multiplying anything by 0 leads to 0, and adding or subtracting 0 from any number does not change the number. 0 cannot be multiplied, divided, added or subtracted to any other number. It is not a prime number at all. We have the same thing in Mayan mathematics. The shell symbol is the symbol of the completion of a group of twenty units and it stands for that number 20. It thus plays two roles, whereas our 0 only plays one.
Apart from these remarks, this book is fairly interesting and should be useful for classwork or project work.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
This is a resource book for High school students and it contains a great number of interesting activities, both for individual students and for groups within a class. It could also be useful for end-of-year projects.
This book puts together three main civilizations and peoples from Mesoamerica and South America. One clue about their older history, their origins is given incidentally in the book when speaking of the Incas. The author says it is believed by archaeologists that the Indian population has been present in Chile for at least 33,000 years. This is true and has to do with the archaeological site of Monte Verde in Chile, though the site has only reached the 25,000-year-old level. There is a third level that is estimated due to core samples to go back to 33,000 years ago.
Those three peoples would then be the resulting civilizations of the migrations of these old human occupants in Chile towards the North, in the Southern and Mesoamerican continents where they eventually met with other Indians arriving from the North. The question is where did these southern peoples come from. The only logical answer is that they came to Chile as the final point of the South Pacific Polynesian migration; There is no reason why the stone-civilization of Easter island should have stopped there after their long voyage (mostly by sea) from South East Asia.
The book insists, though discreetly, on the blood culture of the Mayas and the Aztecs and today we know it was also the case with the Incas. Human and animal sacrifices were equally practiced in the three cultures for the same reason, to pacify their gods. The students will have the opportunity to go beyond and should be suggested to widen the question and check the practices of human sacrifice, often called death penalty, in most if not all human civilizations, particularly the European and Middle Eastern ones. In the same way, as Jesus has been transformed into a religious icon after his crucifixion, the sacrificed human beings of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were bringing to themselves eternity, to their families pride and to their communities the future support of their gods.
This aspect is not explored enough. Systematically in Europe and the Middle East of ancient times killing, in a way or another, human beings was considered a punishment of these human beings, at times for purely fantasized crimes like sorcery or witchcraft. But most of the time the crime was no crime at all but just a particular behavior refused by society, like homosexuality, or “offensive” writings and preachings, or “nationalist” demands like in the case of William Wallace, or even for simple religious differences like Protestantism, Catholicism or Judaism, not to mention Islam.
The writing system is not explained as clearly as it should. The glyphs at stake are not hieroglyphs, not comparable at all to Egyptian hieroglyphs, even in the oldest form of this Mayan writing system. This writing system is a phonetic syllabary in its classical form with some of the glyphs retained as such with their full value and meaning. But the writing system in squares represents a third articulation language whereas the Egyptian hieroglyphs are the writing system of a Semitic language. The alphabet will only be invented by the other Semitic people, the Phoenicians. In a similar way, the Mayan glyphs have nothing to do with the Chinese characters typical of a second articulation language. The question we may ask is whether the Maya language is agglutinative or synthetic-analytical, but definitely a third articulation language like all agglutinative Turkic languages and all Indo-European or Indo-Aryan synthetic-analytical languages. The next question is where did those language come from, what languages are their ancestors? That has to do with the question of from where did these peoples come from and when did they arrive?
At the same time even if these glyphs are mostly syllable glyphs within a phonetic syllabary, they retain in the background the meaning of the original glyphs and that is the most difficult part of this language: the meaning is dictated by the phonetic syllabary used to write words and sentences, but with glyphic meanings behind many of these syllabary elements. Any good Maya Dictionary provides such elements.
We can say there are three calendars, but mathematicians would say there are only two because the Long Count is only the extension of the Haab. At the same time, the Tzolkin is thirteen cycles of twenty days that have proper names, but the numbering of the days in this calendar, besides their naming, is twenty cycles of numbers from1 to 13. This means that days are identified in the calendar by their names followed or preceded by a number from 1 to 13. Each day will appear thirteen times in the calendar each time with a number between 1 and 13 but each number only once, and the same thing for the twenty days. The full calendar contains then in the case of the day “Ben” thirteen instances of it with numbers from 1 to 13, cyclically appearing in the 260-day calendar, in fact with a distance of twenty days between each appearance.
In the same way, it is a mathematical mistake to say that the symbol looking like a shell is equivalent to our “zero.” The base 20 numbering system has nineteen numbers and the shell is the last one marking the completion of one basic 20 units and it triggers the shifting to the next group of twenty. The presentation page 32 is thus erroneous. The first group contains twenty units from 1 to the shell-like symbol for 20. The next group of twenty starts as one upper-tiered dot plus one lower-tier dot for the first number of this group 21. But it is true the Mayas are unique in the world for their use of a vigesimal counting system which is equivalent to our decimal counting system built on a base 10 principle. But the first group of ten is not 0 to 9, those are the digits, but it is 1 to 10 and the next group is 11 to 20. This is logical because 0 is a digit but it is not a number since multiplying anything by 0 leads to 0, and adding or subtracting 0 from any number does not change the number. 0 cannot be multiplied, divided, added or subtracted to any other number. It is not a prime number at all. We have the same thing in Mayan mathematics. The shell symbol is the symbol of the completion of a group of twenty units and it stands for that number 20. It thus plays two roles, whereas our 0 only plays one.
Apart from these remarks, this book is fairly interesting and should be useful for classwork or project work.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Displaying 1 of 1 review